When various American Lisp users got together to create a Common Lisp,
they didn't make any effort to include representatitives from other
countries. They didn't think anyone else would be interested. They
were wrong.

ISLISP is a very small dialect of Lisp being designed by the committee
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22/WG16. The official title is: ISO/IEC 13816:1997
Information technology -- Programming languages, their environments
and system software interaces -- Programming language ISLISP.

A committee draft of ISLISP was published for comment at the end of
1992, and comments received from member nations are presently being
processed.

The name ``ISLISP'' does not stand for International Standard Lisp.
In fact, by international agreement, it does not stand for anything at all.
It is just a name.

Kent Pitman is one of the
chief American representatives to the ISLISP committee.

Emacs is an extensible,
self-documenting text editor. It is widely used by programmers of
many computer languages, including Lisp. It is highly portable and
free.

Emacs is written in a dialect of Lisp called Elisp, which is related
to Maclisp-like dialects, and retains
dynamic scoping. It can be be made to work with some Common Lisp
programs by using some extensions.

Scheme and Smalltalk are both descendents of the
same original research. While M.I.T. people working on Scheme
concentrated on recursion, Xerox Parc people working on Smalltalk
concentrated on object oriented programming.
All message-passing style object oriented languages get their style
from Smalltalk.